PixelJones

@gedeonm@mastodon.social What a foolish waste: Trump and Greg Abbott 's "Flood-proof" $96 million "floating border wall" was already stupid, an affront to the natural landscape, an environment disaster waiting to happen. It's now a bunch of one-ton missiles aimed at bridges and homes downstream. The scale of the f***-up couldn't be more foreseeable.

@mattblaze@federate.social That's easily one of the most artful train images I've ever seen. It really captures the whoosh and immediacy of being trackside.

@UKFilmNerd@mastodon.me.uk Tut, tut, sir. You underestimate the economic power of uber nerds and greed of Amazon MGM. In an era when every studio spares no expense to impress the throngs at (think about it) Comic-Con, if there's a niche to cater to or content they can repurpose for profit, they will. See: Disney's spinoffs/remakes, Netflix's behind-the-scenes, recaps and video podcasts. Also, one more tut, tut (with all due respect): For "hard science fiction", PHM's science is fairly straight-forward and goes down easy with Andy Weir's meticulously approachable exposition (which the movie emulated). Honestly, I know plenty of people who were neither "uber" or "nerd" who enjoyed every bit of it.

@UKFilmNerd@mastodon.me.uk Good review! Funny, most people I follow had the opposite (but predictable) complaint, "The book was better! The science was everything and they left out so many good bits! Wahhh". I laugh because while I thoroughly enjoyed the book (and "hard" science fiction, in general) I'm actually shocked that they were able to release a "mere" 2 hour 45 minute movie that included as much science as they did. Also, the movie got the can-do tone, humor and hopefulness just right. One of the best movies in the last decade, IMO. Hey, and the Motion Picture Academy has said puppeted characters are now eligible for best-supporting Oscar. Give James "Rocky" Ortiz a statue! Also, take heart, all you book-was-better nerds, the film editor said they had a 6-hour rough cut they chopped down to 3.5-hours for the initial audience screener. (Which tested well even at that length.) So, there's plenty of material for an extended cut with the extra science you missed.

@DrewKadel@social.coop Calling #ML, #ChatGPT machines that are designed to "say something that sounds like an answer" is the most accurate description I've heard. Unfortunately, to our peril, people are machines that are quick to conjure meaning from next to nothing (see tea leaves, bigfoot, Q-Anon), much less from well-formatted, grammatically correct streams of credible factoids confidently babbled out by witless word-stringers promoted as #AI.

@AlexTheStampede@maly.io @geerlingguy@mastodon.social @claudeai Hah, yes! Cory Doctorow cites how Facebook famously scraped people's friend connections & posts from MySpace so users would find it easier to migrate to FB ... but .. if a startup tried to do the same to Facebook today, their lawyers would nuke it from space until the rubble glowed. The bell always tolls for Thee not for Me, don't you know.